At the time of writing there are 6 huge corporations that supply energy on the British market, together with many other smaller companies who will be happy to tender for your business.

Understanding individual supply company pricing arrangements and strategies is essential to the process of tendering, for example standing charges will vary in accordance with individual company policies, together with capacity charges, unit prices, transport charges and penalties for non direct debit arrangements.

Several times, last year, one of the larger suppliers had a “loss leader program” in place which was not advertised. This saved one particular client an additional 30% per annum on one site alone.

Loss leader programmes are a welcome symptom of the highly competitive nature of the supply companies, although they are rarely accessible for long.